Apple adding its own co-processors to three Macs in 2018, Bloomberg reports

A new Bloomberg article is reporting that Apple plans to expand the number of Macs using its own co-processor chips this year, a move that could foretell a future where Intel is no longer inside Apple’s computers.

According to the report, Apple is looking to add one of its custom co-processing chips to a pair of MacBook laptops and a Mac desktop to be released later this year. They would join the existing MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and iMac Pro as being Mac systems with Apple-made co-processors. Of course, iPhones and iPads have used the company’s own chips for several years, and the Apple Watch has since its launch in 2015.

For now, Intel remains the provider of the main CPU for Macs, though Bloomberg claims that the recent security woes that have dogged that company’s chips may have provided Apple more ammunition to chart its own course for future Mac processors. Another report today claims Apple is slowing its roll-out of new iOS features in 2018 as it deals with reliability issues, so security — something the company has long touted compared to systems without its “walled garden” approach — is receiving greater attention in Cupertino.

Apple avoids some of the cost issues that other companies have had in the past building their own chips by outsourcing the manufacturing. Designing chips in-house also allows the company to tailor them to new features it’s developing. Abandoning its on-again off-again relationship with Intel would starve the chip maker of its fifth-largest client, according to Bloomberg.

Despite the increasing resources Apple is devoting to chip research and creation, it’s only built computer chips that complement Intel’s primary processor — the T1 co-processor handles the Touch Bar, while the T2 edition offloads some security and power management duties on the iMac Pro. It remains to be seen what a potential T3 co-processor will control, and there’s quite a leap from a chip working on a few tasks to ones that have to power the entire system, potentially including graphics processing to boot.

If Apple decides in the future to produce its own CPUs for Macs, it could drive a great debate among its fanboys. Would Macs (and their users) be better served by Intel, whose high-performance chips have been undermined by security holes, or by Apple, whose chips would be untested in laptops and desktops but could maximize the potential of the Mac OS? It seems unlikely we’ll find out in 2018, but another year of behind-the-scenes work by Apple could make for a very interesting 2019.